Lamar Odom is doing his best to live life on the straight and narrow after "shaking hands with death" when he overdosed in October 2015.

Lamar Odom has spoken about how his drug addiction made him a "scumbag" towards now ex-wife Khloe Kardashian.

The former basketball player has recounted some of the darkest points of his life, including how he first got hooked on cocaine, in a piece titled Done in the Dark for The Players' Tribute.

"(Cocaine is) a hell of a drug," he wrote. "It will make you do things you never thought you'd do. It will turn you into a different person. It will put you in situations where you say to yourself, 'How the f**k did I get here?' Anybody who's lived a complicated, drug-infused life like I've lived knows the cycle - with women, cheating on my wife, s**t like that. Nights when I should have been asleep. Nights when I stayed up sniffing coke. Lots of those nights."

One of the 37-year-old's lowest points came when Khloe caught him snorting cocaine in a motel room with a random woman. While Lamar has told the story before, he used the article to reveal just how heartbroken he felt about the situation.

"I'm a millionaire. I'd made it out of Jamaica, Queens, and won two NBA titles. And I'm in a motel, with some random person, doing coke," he explained. "But I just wanted to get high with this girl, and I had no other place to go. I couldn't take her home. You know, I was being a scumbag. Nothing else I got for that. No excuses. No bulls**t. That's just the truth. My d**k and my habit took me down all the roads that you don't ever wanna go down."

Lamar narrowly escaped death after suffering an overdose in a Las Vegas brothel in October 2015. Despite the fact they were separated at the time, Keeping Up with the Kardashians star Khloe dropped everything to support her estranged spouse, and her attendance in his hospital room when he awoke from his coma made Lamar aware of just what a "bad shape" he was in.

But now the father-of-two is doing his best to stay on the straight and narrow for the sake of his family.

"I shook hands with death," he concluded. "But you know what? Ain't no coming back from that. Even though my funeral would probably be a good funeral, and there'd probably be a lot of people who hadn't seen each other in a long time. But it ain't time for that yet."